Quote Of The Day.

From a Guardian editorial, the closest you can get to the official voice of the left:

The EU can ill afford the luxury of amateur voices, let alone of populist, Eurosceptic neoliberals like Mr Klaus.

They don't just think that Vaclav Klaus is mistaken, they think that allowing him to speak is a 'luxery'.

Lord Ahmed

Lord Ahmed has been one of the noisiest voices demanding a ban on Geert Wilders*, claiming that Wilders is a danger to this country. In reality fewer people have been killed as a result of Fitna than have been killed as a result of Lord Ahmed's text messaging habits.

Ahmed use to be a kind a professional moderate but he has been making definite moves to get in with radical islamists and other nutters of late with stunts including overt threats to Parliament, palling around with terrorists, promoting neo-nazis and praising Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister for a rant in which he promoted an antisemitic conspiracy theorist.

Shouldn't Labour be kicking Lord Ahmed out?


* I'll echo the obligatory disclaimer that Wilders isn't much of a free speech martyr given that he wants to ban Islam.

Update: There appears to be some argument of what Wilders has called for, he hasn't called for a ban on Islam as I wrote earlier, but there have been claims that he called for the banning of the Koran. However it appears that he argued that if the Netherlands was going to have incitement laws it should equally apply to the Koran as any other literature, which isn't exactly calling for a ban.

Fascism & The Political Spectrum.

Having seen a lot of blog discussions of late discussing whether groups that are frequently referred to as 'far right' actually are on the right of the political spectrum I'll throw in my penny's worth. The debate is an old one but the latest round appears to have been kicked off by Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism". As I've taken part in a couple of discussions so a summary will be useful for me to write. Several points should be made, firstly that the revolutionary regimes of Hitler and Mussolini were quite different from the reactionary regimes of Franco and the various Latin American juntas, they are only grouped together because of their anti communism. The Franco type regimes could be said to embody a certain ultra traditionalist trend that is identified with the continental right, although it has little in common with the Anglo Saxon right of conservatism and classical liberalism. Even then they weren't exclusively right wing, the Falange for example was split between a Socialist and a Traditionalist wing.

Secondly the tying liberalism to fascism only makes sense if you use the American definition of 'liberal' which includes everything from Social Democrats, to Socialists, to Communists. Liberal in the British or European sense includes a lot of strands of thought that are closer to libertarianism than anything else. That said Jorg Haider's 'Freedom Party' did for a long time belong to 'Liberal International' the grouping that our own dearly beloved Liberal Democrats are members of.

Despite those two provisos it is obvious to me that Jonah Goldberg is right in saying that Hitler and Mussolini did not represent movements of the right. Well I haven't actually read Goldberg's book but I gather from his critics that actually reading the book is unnecessary in order to understand it. Economically the Nazis were obviously left wing, their manifesto resembles that of most major socialist parties when it comes to the role of the state in society:

11 That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.
12 Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in blood and treasure, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as treason to the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
13 We demand the nationalization of all trusts.
14 We demand profit-sharing in large industries.
15 We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions.
16 We demand the creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class, the immediate communalisation of large stores which will be rented cheaply to small trades people, and the strongest consideration must be given to ensure that small traders shall deliver the supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.
17 We demand an agrarian reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to expropriate the owners without compensation of any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.
18 We demand that ruthless war be waged against those who work to the injury of the common welfare. Traitors, usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished with death, regardless of creed or race.
19 We demand that Roman law, which serves a materialist ordering of the world, be replaced by German common law.
20 In order to make it possible for every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education, and thus the opportunity to reach into positions of leadership, the State must assume the responsibility of organizing thoroughly the entire cultural system of the people. The curricula of all educational establishments shall be adapted to practical life. The conception of the State Idea (science of citizenship) must be taught in the schools from the very beginning. We demand that specially talented children of poor parents, whatever their station or occupation, be educated at the expense of the State.
21 The State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health by providing maternity welfare centres, by prohibiting juvenile labour, by increasing physical fitness through the introduction of compulsory games and gymnastics, and by the greatest possible encouragement of associations concerned with the physical education of the young.

They didn't implement all of these policies, but that doesn't show that they didn't believe in them merely that Hitler's priority was war and genocide first, the economy later. In Britain we look back on the likes of British Leyland as examples of how widespread socialism was in the 1970s, yet the left like to dismiss the nationalised German car industries of the 1930s as irrelevant.

Communists are described as far left because they represent a more extreme and authoritarian version of the mainstream left, both regard the goal of equality as paramount and set about achieving it, though with much less coercion in the democratic world. Taking various right wing concepts (capitalism, stability, anti-populism) to their logical extreme does not end up with anything resembling fascism. In some ways fascism was contrary to left wing thought and was more cautious in throwing off their domestic order than communists were so whilst they aren't far right, their form of non-Marxist socialism can't simply be described as far left. If anything with the desire to be all things to all men it would be best thought of as a centrist philosophy applied with extreme ruthlessness. The far centre doesn't make geometric sense if you consider the political spectrum to be a straight line of course but that's an issue of representation.

Politics & Threats To Science.

Like most people in this country I regard creationism as an intellectual absurdity, I was going to say I regard creationists as absurd but I realise that otherwise very intelligent people can sincerely believe ridiculous propositions, Isaac Newton and his belief in alchemy springs to mind. As long as they aren't aggressively trying to assert their idiotic beliefs I have no problem with them. Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review has a post up about remarks made about evolution and creationism in politics by Marty Peretz of the New Republic:

He writes at the New Republic: "My minimum condition for and from a plausible president is that he accept that men and women are descended from apes and monkeys. Huckabee surely doesn't. But, then, I'm not sure that George Bush does either." Do scientists accept this either? Back when I was in high school, they taught us that apes, monkeys, and humans shared ancestors in common rather than that the last group evolved from the first two. It seems like an awfully imprecise way for Peretz to state a truth he considers so important.

This encapsulates a lot of the problems I have with those who sneer about the views held by certain people about creationism, usually they are just as ignorant and misguided about the science as the creationists themselves. The likes of Peretz who don't understand evolution but know that they are passionately supportive of it aren't a huge concern in any practical sense, they're just annoying. The real danger to evolutionary science comes not from creationists or the Peretzs of this world but rather from those who claim to believe in evolution but try to silence anyone who proposes that it may apply to humans as much as any other species.

E.O. Wilson's landmark book, Sociobiology, was met with immense hostility by the far left, including by supposed scientists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. He was variously physically attacked and smeared as a Nazi* by members of the far left under front groups like 'Science for the People' a totalitarian anti-science movement. Wilson's offence was to write a book about the biological origins of behaviour in animals, including humans whereas devout marxists like Lewontin believed that this blasphemes against Das Kapital. Whilst creationists and ID'ers believe errant nonsense they pose no serious threat to the advancement of science, the radical left on the other hand have a consistent track record of trying to derail politically inconvenient science.

* I don't endorse the whole contents of this site, I'm only linking to them because they have reproduced one of Wilson's essays.

Holocaust Deniers At The Oxford.Union

I can't get too worked up about the Oxford Union's invitation to Nick Griffin and David Irving. Obviously the Union's stated reason for offering the invitation is rubbish, it isn't about free speech, since no one has a right to speak at any debating society of their choice. They are publicity seeking pillocks, however the loudest opponents of the debate are melodramatic ninnies too, claiming that Oxford students are now scared of being attacked by skinheads because of these invitations.

They are rather selective in their outrage as well, seeing as very few of them protested about the leader of the totalitarian Islamist group Hizb Ut Tahrir speaking at the Oxford Union earlier this year.

If any society which I belonged to invited a liar and fraud like the Hitler enthusiast David Irving to be a guest speaker then I would be inclined to do as some OU members have done and resign, I'm less well informed about Nick Griffin so I don't have a firm view on him. However letting Irving speak is not going to result in a big upturn for the neo nazi movement. Totalitarian movements don't gain support as a result of their well reasoned arguments or the eloquence of their propaganda. It is the element of coercion that make these movements dangerous as the late philosopher Eric Hoffer said sometime in the True Believer:

"Were propaganda by itself one tenth as potent as it is made out to be, the totalitarian regimes of Russia, Germany, Italy, and Spain would have been mild affairs. They would have been blatant and brazen but without the ghastly brutality of secret police, concentration camps, and masss extermination."

This applies equally to the same movements before they took power, where the coercion took the form of Brownshirts and Redshirts acting as quasi-military wings for the various groups. To prevent the rise of fascists, communists or islamists the focus should not be on preventing them from speaking or even on making sure that their arguments are defeated (in practice the likes of Irving or Galloway are often highly eloquent and capable of winning debates even when they are wrong). Instead the role of the state is preventing them from exerting any physical threat.